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FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub
- merlindru 10mo agoThe repo in question incorporated FFmpeg code while claiming their code is Apache 2.0-licensed over 1.5 years ago[1] This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead. [1] https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137 https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137
- a_void_sky 10mo agothey waited for more than 1.5 years and they did not forgot
- mystraline 10mo agoThey were given 1.5 YEARS of lead time. And FLOSS should treat commercial entities the same way they treat us. Seriously, if we copied in violation their code, how many hours would pass before a DMCA violation? FLOSS should be dictatorial in application of the license. After all, its basically free to use and remix as long as you follow the easy rules. I'm also on the same boat that Android phone creators should also be providing source fully, and should be confiscated on import for failure of copyright violations. But ive seen FLOSS devs be like "let's be nice". Tit for tat is the best game theory so far. Time to use it.
- helterskelter 10mo agoMy understanding is that the GPL doesn't have fucktons of precedent behind it in court. You bet the house on a big case and lose, the precedent will stick with GPL and may even weaken all copyleft licenses. Also, it's better to gently apply pressure and set a track record of violators taking corrective measures so when you end up in court one day you've got a list of people and corporate entities which do comply because they believed that the terms were clear enough, which would lend weight to your argument. Saying this as a GPL hardliner myself.
- fl0id 10mo agoAFAIK it has enough precedent (also depending a bit on jurisdiction, but you only need one) but the interpretations of what that/the license should cover differ. Like f e if you wanted to argue driver devs would have to open-source their firmware blobs or their proprietary driver loaded by a kernel shim you will have a tough time and prob lose
- LeoWattenberg 10mo agoMost licenses, EULAs, contracts and so on don't have much precedent in court. There's no reason to believe that GPL would fold once subjected to sufficiently crafty lawyers.
- Conan_Kudo 10mo agoIt definitely does have precedent in multiple jurisdictions. Heck, SFC just won against Vizio enforcing the GPL's terms in the US, and there have been previous wins in France and Germany.
- ajross 10mo agoThat's not it. The LGPL doesn't require dynamic linking, just that any distributed artifacts be able to be used with derived versions of the LGPL code. Distributing buildable source under Apache 2.0 would surely qualify too. The problem here isn't a technical violation of the LGPL, it's that Rockchip doesn't own the copyright to FFMPEG and simply doesn't have the legal authority to release it under any license other than the LGPL. What they should have done is put their modified FFMPEG code into a forked project, clearly label it with an LGPL LICENSE file, and link against that.
- rvnx 10mo agoCould there have been other / better moves with sending a reminder. I think the devs of that Chinese company seemed to immediately acknowledge the attribution. Now the OSS community loses the OSS code of IloveRockchip, and FFmpeg wins practically nothing, except recognition on a single file (that devs from Rockchip actually publicly acknowledged, though in a clumsy way) but loses in reputation and loses a commercial fork (and potential partner).
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoThey had ample warning and ignored the license. what you're even on about?
- rvnx 10mo ago[flagged]
- akerl_ 10mo agoThe amount of armchair quarterbacking here is wild.
- rvnx 10mo agoThen waiting to see how they addressed these points and what were the approaches taken and why ? Here spent time to think and document all the IRC chats, the Twitter thread, the attitude of the SoC manufacturer, etc. There has to be a backstory to suddenly come after 1.5 years for an issue that could have been solved in 10 minutes.
- dzhiurgis 10mo agoWhat happens when you want to mix two libraries with different licences?
- koolba 10mo agoIf you own one of them, mix in LGPL code, and publish it, the result is entirely LGPL. If you don’t own it and cannot legally relicense part as LGPL, you’re not allowed to publish it. Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- eqvinox 10mo agoThis is not correct; you're simply required to follow all applicable licenses at the same time. This may or may not be possible, but is in practice quite commonly done.
- Nevermark 10mo ago> Just because you can merge someone else’s code does not mean you’re legally allowed to do so. > This may or may not be possible I am not sure what you are saying, that is different from the comment you replied to.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- abigail95 10mo agoCompletely depends on how much you've "mixed in", and facts specific to that individual work. Fair use doesn't get thrown out the window because GPL authors have a certain worldview. Second, there are a lot of non-copyrightable components to source code - if you can't copyright it - you certainly can't GPL it. These can be copied freely by anyone at any time.
- amszmidt 10mo agoIncorporating compatible code, under different license is perfectly OK and each work can have different license, while the whole combined work is under the terms of another. I'm honestly quite confused what FFmpeg is objecting to here, if ILoveRockchip wrote code, under a compatible license (which Apache 2.0 is wrt. LGPLv2+ which FFmpeg is licensed under) -- then that seems perfectly fine. The repository in question is of course gone. Is it that ILoveRockchip claims that they wrote code that was written FFmpeg? That is bad, and unrelated to any license terms, or license compatibility ... just outright plagiarism.
- papercrane 10mo agoThe DMCA notice is available here: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-18-ffmpeg.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1... The notice has a list of files and says that they were copied from ffmpeg, removed the original copyright notice, added their own and licensed under the more permissive Apache license.
- amszmidt 10mo agoThanks for the link; sadly none of the links to the repo can be viewed to see what exactly occurred. To those downvoting, curious why? Many of the links are not viewable, since GitHub hides them, so any discussion becomes quite tricky.
- kstrauser 10mo agoI didn't downvote. I suspect people did because it sounded like you were defending ILoveRockchip's actions, based on either 1) not understanding what they did, and/or 2) not having access to the facts. People get snippy about abusing Free Software.
- progval 10mo agoYou can find an archive of the links' targets at https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:5861f191873366a1a6b18bdeacee9a55d2d8cb49;origin=https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp;visit=swh:1:snp:65c3ea2995fea50c556ae4fc2305e6b2bad6e4a3;anchor=swh:1:rev:437bfbeb9567cca9cd9080e3f6954aa9d6a94f18;path=/mpp/codec/dec/ https://archive.softwareheritage.org/swh:1:dir:5861f19187336...
- LeoWattenberg 10mo agoCopy pasting code is allowed under LGPL, but doing so while removing license headers and attribution of code snippets would not be.
- chii 10mo agocopy/pasting, or using some other mechanism to do digital duplication is irrelevant - the removal of the existing license and essentially _re-license_ without authority is the problem, no matter what the mechanism of including the code is.
- GuB-42 10mo agoOnly if the code you copy pasted the LGPL part into is licenced under a compatible license, and Apache is not. The simplest way to comply while keeping your incompatible license is to isolate the LGPL part into a dynamic library, there are other ways, but it is by far the most common.
- merlindru 10mo agothis is accurate and how i should have phrased it. i should not have mentioned dynamic linking; you're right it's not relevant thank you!
- ranger_danger 10mo agoLGPL does not mandate dynamic linking, it mandates the ability to re-assemble a new version of the library. This might mean distributing object files in the case of a statically-linked application, but it is still allowed by the license.
- merlindru 10mo agothis is accurate - thank you for the correction
- doctorpangloss 10mo agoI like FFmpeg, I hate doing the whole whataboutism thing, especially because FFmpeg is plainly in the right here, but... listen, FFmpeg as a product is a bunch of license violations too. Something something patents, something something, "doctrine of unclean hands." I worry that HN downvotes people who are trying to address the bigger picture here, because the net result of a lack of nuance always winds up being, "Okay, the real winners are Google and Apple."
- kortilla 10mo agoIndependent implementations of an algorithm are a different dimension from software licensing. So the “unclean hands” argument doesn’t hold water here. Patents != copyright
- webstrand 10mo agoWhat licenses are they violating?
- reedciccio 10mo agoThey don't violate licenses otherwise they would have been blown out of existence a long time ago, drown lawsuit after lawsuit.
- doctorpangloss 10mo agoThe ones that Microsoft Apple and Google pay for, the codec licenses. FFmpeg believes that only end users need licenses for codecs, which is not only their belief, but it’s not a belief of Microsoft, Apple and Google, and it is true the sense of the status quo, but also, LGPL violations are a status quo. So you can see how it’s a bad idea for FFmpeg to make a stink about licenses.
- saghm 10mo agoWith the exception of the Apache license, most major licenses don't cover patents. I have no idea about proprietary licenses if that's what you're talking about here, but it's a bit unclear, so it might help to go into more details than "something something" if you're intending to make a compelling case.
- compsciphd 10mo agothis is fundamentally false. The LGPL was created because of static linking where GPLd code would be in the distributed binary. It's an open question (the FSF has their opinion, but it has never been adjudicated) if the GPL impacts dynamic linking. One could argue that if one ships GPL dynamic libraries together with one's non GPLd code, one is shipping an aggregate and hence the GPL infects the whole, but its more complicated to say if one ships a non GPLd binary that runs on Debian, Redhat et al and uses GPLd libraries that they ship.
- nikitalita 10mo agosomeone post an archive link, I can't read that
- nticompass 10mo agoDoes this work for you? https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984 https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984
- antonvs 10mo agoIs working around accessing an embargoed site really any better than just accessing it directly? Morally, what's the difference? If everyone just actively boycotted that site, it would become irrelevant overnight. Anything else is simply condoning it continued existence. Don't kid yourself.
- perryprog 10mo agoThe issue is that you need an account to view the replies, not that there's a moral opposition to visiting the website (though it could be that too).
- antonvs 10mo ago[flagged]
- JCattheATM 10mo agoThe two are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes content is posted on a site people don't want to support, so making a copy of it and viewing/sharing the copy is preferable.
- darkamaul 10mo agoXlssid
- JCattheATM 10mo ago
- LargoLasskhyfv 10mo agoClash of cultures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai#Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai#Regulation vs. the 鬼子 鬼佬 老外
- _zagj 10mo agoNot a fan of the CCP, but GH in general has a big problem with users not understanding and respecting licensing and passing off others' code as their own, sometimems unintentionally, often not.
- kstrauser 10mo agoWhat's the clash? Is the claim that China lacks the notion of copyright, or that they don't care about the rule of law?
- LargoLasskhyfv 10mo agoNo, they have that. It's just not universally applied, or rather with 'some flexibility' instead :-) It remains to be seen how much 'pull' FFmpeg has against the 'push' of Rockchip.
- ThePowerOfFuet 10mo agohttps://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984 https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984
- dheera 10mo agoTime to create a decentralized, blockchain-based GitHub (GitCoin?) and have every commit be a transaction on the chain. Nothing would ever be takedownable.
- michaelmrose 10mo agoThe cost would be incredible even for just a pointer to distributed file storage
- odie5533 10mo agoGithub stores about 19 PB. That would cost about $20k a year on Filecoin. Filecoin currently has more supply than demand because it's speculation-driven right now.
- dheera 10mo agoThere wouldn't be an org maintaining it. You would just buy $100 worth of GitCoin and that would be enough for 10000 commits, or something like that.
- LeoWattenberg 10mo agoI mean, torrenting is decentralised and not technically takedownable. But it was entirely possible to make it legally painful for people involved in it, as seen in eg. The Pirate Bay, megaupload or an entire cease-and-desist letter industry around individual torrenting users Intentional noncompliance with copyright law can get you quite a distance, but there's a lot of money involved, so if you ever catch the wrong kind of attention, usually by being too successful, you tend to get smacked.
- JCattheATM 10mo ago> I mean, torrenting is decentralised and not technically takedownable. It's fairly trivial to block torrent traffic.
- zzo38computer 10mo agoGit already has a blockchain; what you will need to do next is to make copies of the objects of the repositories on other servers as well. (However, I don't know if the blockchain includes tags on git (it seems to me that it might not but I don't know enough about it), although it does include objects. Fossil includes tags in the blockchain as well as files, commits, etc.)
- firesteelrain 10mo agoNot familiar with Rockchip. Plenty of searches come up with cases of people incorporating ffmpeg into Rockchip projects. I still see the license files and headers. What is different with this DMCA takedown? https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-rockchip
- hogrug 10mo agoThe one you reference doesn't look like it misrepresents the licenses, i.e. of you use it to make your own derivative you would expect to have to share modifications you make to the LGPL code.
- nottorp 10mo agoThat's because you can incorporate LGPL code into any project as long as you respect the license. Rockchip is a hardware platform, what hardware the code runs on isn't relevant here.
- firesteelrain 10mo agoSince the link to the actual code is DMCA’d in Rockchip’s repository, anyone have a fork so we can form an opinion independently?
- nottorp 10mo agoSo the comments explaining the situation from the HN community aren’t good enough?
- firesteelrain 10mo agoIf the repository were still accessible, the only thing I’d be looking for is whether the LGPL portions were modified or statically linked. Absent that, the license-based explanation makes sense.
- 10mo ago
- bfrog 10mo agoI wonder how this will work with AI stuff generating code without any source or attribution. It’s not like the LLMs make this stuff up out of thin air it comes from source material.
- userbinator 10mo agoEverything is a derivative work.
- alienbaby 10mo agoLlm's do not verbatim disgorge chunks of the code they were trained on.
- idle_zealot 10mo agoSurely they do sometimes?
- kelseyfrog 10mo agoA 26-sided die reproduces chuncks of source code. What's the dividing line?
- afiori 10mo agoIIRC at a point it was 6 line of code
- AshamedCaptain 10mo agoThis is a multi-terabyte sized dice that is not at all random AND has most definitely copied the source code in question to begin with.
- kelseyfrog 10mo agoThe die is certainly not multi-terabyte. A more realistic number would be 32k-sided to 50k-sided if we want to go with a pretty average token vocabulary size. Really, it comes down to encoding. Arbitrarily short utf-8 encoded strings can be generated using a coin flip.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoAlright, love it. Who do I donate to?
- wmf 10mo agohttps://www.ffmpeg.org/donations.html https://www.ffmpeg.org/donations.html
- cryptica 10mo agoThe law doesn't seem to work anymore. There are so many cases where someone can do illegal stuff in plain sight and nothing can be done about it. Not everyone has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare to get a lawyer. By the time you manage to save up the money, you realize that this system is absolutely crooked and that you don't trust it to obtain justice anyway even with the lawyers and even if you are legally in the right. The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns." All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoSo here we have the good guys using the law and ... at least temporarily ... winning... so what's your point?
- cryptica 10mo agoYou can see it everywhere. In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning. I see this over and over. Same thing all over the west. I remember Rowan Atkinson (the UK actor) made a speech about this effect a couple of years ago and never heard about it since but definitely feeling it more and more... No exposure, no money, no legal representation. And at the same time we are being gaslit about our privilege.
- martey 10mo ago> In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning. It took 2 years because FFmpeg waited 2 years to send a DMCA notice to Github, not because of delays in the legal system. I think you are conflating different unrelated issues here.
- meindnoch 10mo ago[flagged]
- only-one1701 10mo agoChatGPT write this bro?
- alfiedotwtf 10mo agoSoftware licensing is just another form of property rights, and property rights is what society uses to incentivise civility.
- eithed 10mo agoI guess who cares about civility if you're the last man standing. Also - that word: civility. We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here
- throwaway150 10mo ago> We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here That self-interest has led to cooperation between humans. Humans have evolved to work together, cooperate, form social bonds, and friendships because doing so improves survival and wellbeing over the long run. Civility is part of that toolkit. It is not a denial of self-interest. Civility is part of that self-interest.
- alfiedotwtf 10mo agoThank you, this is what I was trying to say… there are incentives to cooperate, even though individually we can be selfishly evil.
- wiml 10mo ago> Software licensing is just another form of property rights That's a pretty substantial assertion and without much to back it up. The framing of copyright as basically the same as ownership of chattel or land is a propaganda campaign.
- habibur 10mo agoLGPL allows compiling the whole of ffmpeg into a so or lib and then dynamically linking from there for your closed source code. That's the main difference between LGPL and GPL. But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed. Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.
- larschdk 10mo agoCopyright law defines derivative work by substantial similarity and dependence, not by technical mechanisms like linking. Technical measures such as linking is not a copyright concept. Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance, but it is not sufficient. Dynamic linking does not automatically prevent a combined work from being a derived work.
- F3nd0 10mo ago> Dynamic linking is a condition for LGPL compliance No, it isn’t. The condition says to allow your users to make and use their own modifications to the part of the software which falls under the LGPL. Dynamic linking is only a convenient way of allowing this, not a requirement.
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoFOSS is and always was a scam, in order to feed tons of code to LLMs and kicking coders in the balls, so they could not monetize their work. And, noone cares about the licenses, everyone steals and robs whatever is at arms length.
- uriahlight 10mo agoSo FOSS is bad and commercial software is bad? What's left - going outside and touching some grass?
- mcronce 10mo agoFOSS has been a thing for decades longer than LLMs have even been a vague notion.
- lofaszvanitt 10mo agoAnd that doesn't mean it's not 100% bullshit. Also, nation states have 10-20 year plans... yet your mental horizon spans a few days at most.
- asdfsa1314 10mo agoChinese is steal of coding, which can pop device company use ffmpeg, 有利有弊
- tkel 10mo agoHere is the github thread which had some recent discussion before the repo was taken down. Rockchip said something like it would be too much work to fix the licenses for all the new chips they are creating. https://web.archive.org/web/20251103193914/https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp/issues/530 https://web.archive.org/web/20251103193914/https://github.co...
- rendaw 10mo agoThe archive isn't very good for the thread. Is that what they said though? From the comments I see they said "we're working on it, but we're busy with XYZ" and then months passed. Archive won't load the remaining 3 items for me.
- tkel 10mo agoYes it's not loading on the archive but I was following the thread closely, it was said recently within the last few months which prompted further discussion and this action by ffmpeg.
- mlrtime 10mo ago100% my assumptions but: They were never really working on it, they thought it would just go away. Maybe some junior/senior dev took a shot at it, gave a project plan and it went nowhere.
- Mathnerd314 10mo agoTakedown letter: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-18-ffmpeg.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1...
- jalapenos 10mo agoWould be nice to live in a world where the stupidity of "intellectual property" and "copyright" had already been laughed out of the room. But alas we live in this one, the moral and legal equivalent of walking through a park covered in trash.
- jimjimwii 10mo agoYou largely have bill gates to thank. Code is math and anyone who insists otherwise is a personof questionable morals, intelligence, or both.